Byron Johnson Brown
Project Manager
Healthy London Partnership
2020 Bio: Byron Johnson Brown has a lifetime of lived experience managing a long term condition, and over a decade of professional experience in the health system. Byron’s vision for a more personalised and equitable health service has been heavily influenced by his personal experiences, and early career in health justice and epidemiological research. More recently, Byron has succeeded in a partnership team to develop London’s Next Steps for Social Prescribing, published on the 2 October 2019. Byron currently advises on digital transformation, and manages relationships for the Healthy London Partnership’s Social Investment Fund. Byron’s interests are in the future of genomics in population health, he is a graduate in Entrepreneurship & Music and Media Management, and is currently completing a Msc in Healthcare Leadership at the University of Birmingham.
Digital Pioneer Fellowship project summary: Healthy London Partnership and Ayup Digital are developing a new support directory, NHS Connect, that gives Link Workers and other professionals, as well as people searching themselves, access to comprehensive support and advice to promote health and wellbeing. The context for this first test is that the solution will be importing data from multiple existing databases, such as those held by the Charity Commission, Voluntary Service Councils or Local Authorities. They will then send an automated message to the organisation in question to claim their listing and start adding more information in an open data format. The aspiration for the innovation is that it will also host culturally competent content. Small improvements to the accuracy and quality of data will make a big difference to the range and quality of support information that Social Prescribing Link workers and the other new roles in the Primary Care Networks (Community Pharmacist and Physiotherapist) will be able to offer everyone.
Estimated number of patients / staff impacted by the project: The number of initial testing locations is three London Boroughs home to approximately 800,000 Londoners. The desired system impact is related to the benefits of co-developing and getting stakeholders to sign up to an “opportunity charter” alongside adoption of the technology solution. The charter speaks to the need to address root health inequalities through universal access to data on support opportunities and shared intelligence on different groups’ access to support.
Goal(s) for the programme: Despite all the digital capabilities of the 21st century, it remains notoriously difficult for people to find out about the support that could help them. The goal is to apply methodologies for population targeting so that 135,000 people on the cusp of comorbidity benefit from Connect by 23/24.
Another goal is to improve the platform for London’s approximately 150 Link worker workforce in order to support holistic reviews and the availability of support offers.